


From The Ground Up

by NotFlyingWithOtters



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:48:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotFlyingWithOtters/pseuds/NotFlyingWithOtters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each carefully constructed wall was coming down. Each meticulously crafted defence was breaking, collapsing, falling, folding. Sherlock felt years of hard work, years of pretending not to feel, of numbing himself with drugs and experiments finally fall apart. His walls were crumbling. He felt his world unravelling, and all because of a one John Hamish Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From The Ground Up

_One by one the knots we've tied will come undone._

Each carefully constructed wall was coming down. Each meticulously crafted defence was breaking, collapsing, falling, folding. Sherlock felt years of hard work, years of pretending not to feel, of numbing himself with drugs and experiments finally fall apart. His walls were crumbling. He felt his world unravelling, and all because of a one John Hamish Watson.

_Like picking locks, we'll sow our seeds beneath the sun._

Sherlock knew the theory behind picking locks. Jam the tumblers, turn and push. It wasn't hard, but somehow John had picked the lock on his heart that he'd kept so securely locked down for so long. His blogger had planted a seed in his heart, and now, it was growing. Shyly, slowly, opening to the world, opening Sherlock's heart to the world. To John. To love.

_Our accomplice is the rain,  
With patience, that of saints._

The rain in London was the only certainty now. The rain of the city he loved and held to his heart accompanied the sun of John's love. Helped the seed within his heart germinate from affection, from longing glances to those first tentative kisses that nearly stopped his heart. The rain that put out the burning fear that John would leave. Showed him the patience in John's soul. That took him as he was, that waited. The rain slowed John's advances until he was ready. The rain in London saved them from ending before they'd even begun.

_It grows and grows,  
Our home sweet home._

Slowly the seed grew, germinating in the sun of John's love, bathed in the glow and warmth of unhurried kisses, and hours spent committing the bodies of one another to memory. Sherlock could feel the warmth in his heart, behind the rusted lock and deep in that seed it was growing. Tentative feelers exploring what it is to truly love and be loved.

_It took me 27 years to wrap my head around this._

Years of conditioning had hidden Sherlock's heart from the world. Years being told he was a psychopath, a freak, incapable of love only strengthened the guards Sherlock built. From the age of six he'd been building, and now, twenty seven years later, those walls were coming down; brick by brick in John's careful hands.

_To brush the ashes off of everything I love._

The sun of John's love burned away the ropes holding those heavy steel doors in front of his heart shut. Burned away the hatred of himself in a warm flood of cleansing fire. John showed him how to brush away the ashes off his past, expose his vulnerability, let John in. The ash swirled around them, the cigarette clutched in Sherlock's hand long burned out at John's whispers, his kisses, his love of everything about Sherlock he despised. Slowly, Sherlock grew to love these faults too.

_Where courage was contagious, confidence was key._

John dragged him head first, blinking like a newborn into the light that came with his love. John's confidence in Sherlock to find the part of his heart he thought lost, to find what he assumed long dead. The key of John's confidence fitted the lock to the door that opened the floodgates, encouraged Sherlock to be what he always thought he was incapable of. A lover and one who was loved.

_Right as rain, soft as snow,_  
It grows and grows and grows,  
Our home sweet home. 

Everything was right. The rain still fell, occasionally quenching the sun of John's love, but as he knew now, the sun will always break through the clouds. The rain reminded him it was real, it wasn't perfect. The feel of John's skin, soft as freshly fallen snow beneath his fingers, but with the heat of the hot desert sand was his home. John was home. Somehow he'd worked his way into his heart and set up a residence there. Sherlock found he didn't mind. He was John's home, and John was his.

_We'll try to document this light,  
With cameras to our eyes,_

The light of John's love was incapable of capturing, something beyond Sherlock's understanding, beyond his knowledge. Something fresh and new that slipped through his fingers like the smoke that proceeded the ash of his doors burning. He could not capture John's love with a camera lense, although he tried. It took him a while to learn that love could not be seen, it demanded to be felt. Like pain, though this was better, it burned in the best way. In John's love, Sherlock was a Phoenix, reborn again from the ashes as something new, something better.

_In an effort to remember  
What being mended feels like._

Sherlock had been fixed once before, had been whole once, before the world had turned cold and mocked his intelligence, dubbed him as a freak or a sociopath. He had never truly believed he could be mended, but when John was inside him, a wholeness he could not explain ripped through him. He had never felt more alive, more fixed than when John said he loved him. He felt fixed once more when he was lying on John's chest as the doctor slept, hearing a heart that would beat in tandem with his own.

_We're home sweet home._

221b Baker Street was his house. London was his city. John was his home. He could be anywhere in the world, but with John by his side it was home. Baker Street was simply bricks and mortar, London a city that grew from a single house and spread, the sprawling and infinitely alive city large and demanding, but neither were his home. His home was with his fingers tangled in John's hair, with John's warm chest beneath his hands as he catalogued his heartbeat, with John's breath mingling with his own when they had just woken. With tea and biscuits and mundane. With John, he was home.


End file.
